When is Brand Traffic Incremental?

A question I get often in paid search is do I really need to be spending money on branded traffic? Why would I spend money on people who would just go to the website anyway? 

What they’re really asking me is how do I know that my branded search spend is incremental to organic search? Will organic search pick up all the traffic if there is no paid search ad present?

I’ve personally done incrementality testing for basically every client I’ve worked for in my career (this is a VERY common question) and I will tell you now exactly when your paid search ads are incremental.

A paid search ad is incremental when there is competition present on that term (meaning the organic result will show under a competitor’s ad) and when the first organic result is not the company website. A paid search ad is not incremental when there is no competition on those terms and the first organic result is the brands website.

Ok great, you know when branded paid search ads are incremental, but how do you know how often they are incremental? You have to test! The most recent incrementality test I was a part of I saw that, for this particular brand, organic results did not pick up as much as 70% of paid traffic (including shopping). 

At the end of the day you’ll have to do your own incrementality testing for your brand to know exactly how much incremental value you’re getting from paid branded traffic. The best testing structure is a Geolift test where you negate your brand terms in certain states and not others. Ideally you’d be able to work with Google or your data analytics team to decide which states should be test and control markets. I would also suggest segmenting your brand traffic by trademark terms (just your brand name, for example “nike”) versus modified brand terms (brand name + modifier, for example “nike shoes”). That way you can read out if it’s incremental for you to bid on trademark terms, which typically have a very high organic result rating. I’ve suggested to brands in the past to not bid on trademark terms as it wasn’t incrementally valuable for them.   

If an incrementality test is out of reach for you right now, that’s okay, the good news is that I’ve already told you the situation in which paid search ads are incremental for your business. When there’s no competition bidding on your brand terms and the top organic result is your brands website. There are companies that can segment your brand traffic by incremental vs non-incremental traffic like Adthena or Revvim’s tool called AdAi. These tools scan the search engine results page every time your ad is served to understand your organic rankings and competition. It will stop your ad from serving in moments where your ad will not provide incremental value. In my opinion the tools work as advertised and if you’re concerned about saving some money on branded spend I would highly suggest checking them out!

So to finally answer the question, yes your branded search ads are incremental but only when a competitor is bidding on your terms or you’re not the first organic result.